The hard drive is a 500GB SATA. The hard drive is clearly plugged in (both cables plugged in)... Since it's a SATA, doesn't need a pin.

I took this hard drive from a working desktop and put it in a customized desktop... The thing is, it's a partly customized desktop, just a different DVD drive, hard drive, and graphics card. The motherboard and everything else is the same as was in this computer.

Anyways, the hard drive is empty and was working as a slave, simply to put things on it. Now, I'm trying to put it in a different desktop and it's simply not working. Both the DVD and HDD are recognized as the Primary SATA master and slave. This seems correct to me.

There's no OS installed on the hard drive. Shouldn't I just have to put the Windows disk in the DVD drive and then boot up from the disc and install Windows on it? Doesn't Windows format the HDD by itself? I mean, the HDD is being recognized by the computer, just for whatever reason it's not picking up any media.

I've tried booting up from Windows disc and it just goes to the message "Reboot and Select proper Boot Device..." etc

Tried that as well. Everything is plugged in, securely as well. I even switched the cables. I don't know if it matters, but the SATA cables, some go up and some go down, if you know what I mean... should I try making it so two that go down are connected to one device and the two that go down are connected to the other device? The cables are like this http://www.overclock.net/attachment...ng-special-angled-sata-cable-my-img_04997.jpg and the other little cable is just like that, but smaller.

I can rule out all of them except the bad disk. I will try a different Windows disk and see if that works. Shouldn't be any bad connections and the DVD drive is working fine and the HDD is being recognized and therefore should be properly connected. I'll let you guys know.

Edit: come to think of it, even if the disk was bad (unless it's so bad that it's not bootable at all), there's no place at all on the screen that comes and tells me to press a key to boot from the disk, although the message regarding media does tell me to press a key once media is in place... Anyways, i'll try a different one.